Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, RDIis an English musician, composer, record producer, singer, writer, and visual artist. He is best known for his pioneering work in ambient and electronic music as well as his influential contributions to rock, worldbeat, chance, and generative music styles. A self-described "non-musician," Eno has advocated a methodology of "theory over practice" throughout his career, and has helped to introduce a variety of unique recording techniques and conceptual approaches into...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionMusic Producer
Date of Birth15 May 1948
Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.
Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.
Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.
Whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently - that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies.
If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
American television really is pathetic.
The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.
When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises.
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.
The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.
Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is.
Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.
John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.